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My plan is to do a Masters Conversion degree in Psychology this September.

But the problem is - I’m not 100% sure about what to do after yet.

I know I’m fascinated by the subject, and I know I want to work with people, but there’s so many routes I could go down, that I’m pulling my hair out trying to pick one.

What if I choose the wrong thing?

And what if I spend years of my life, and thousands in education, only to realise at the end, that this isn’t actually what I want to do?

In the process of trying to figure this out, I’ve come across some ideas that have helped me get a bit clearer on my direction.

If you’re in the same boat, and trying to figure out what you want to do long term, they might be helpful for you, too.

This post covers two of the ideas I’ve found most useful.

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Minimum Viable Work Experience

“The lesson of the MVP is that any additional work beyond what was required to start learning is waste, no matter how important it might have seemed at the time.” Eric Reis

​It’s not uncommon to meet someone who spends 3-5 years in education, only to realise that when they get there, it isn’t actually what they wanted.While travelling in South America when I was 21, I noticed I was meeting a lot of people who were transitioning out of an old career and into a new one. (A disproportionate amount of them were accountants.)

Our education system sets us up for failure this way.

At 18, we’re forced to pick a career path and make a decision that will affect the rest of our lives. At 27, I’m just starting to get to know myself - at 18, I had no chance.

So is there a way to avoid this?

Is there a way to test out all of the different things we think we might like to do, without investing huge amounts of time and money in education - only to realise at the end, that it wasn’t what we actually wanted?

In the startup world, there’s something called a minimum viable product (MVP for short).

In a nutshell, an MVP is the most basic version of your product that you can release to the public. The goal is to get feedback from real customers early to see if it’s something people actually want, before you spend years in planning and thousands in product development.

If people buy it, then you know you’re on to something. If it’s a complete flop, then you know you need to make some changes - or drop the idea completely.

This gives entrepreneurs a great opportunity to test their ideas - without investing huge amounts of time and money in the process.

So, what if you applied the MVP model to figuring out what you want to do?

What if you tried to get ‘Minimum Viable Work Experience’?

What if, for a few months, you actually went and volunteered in the industry you were thinking of dedicating your life to?

Then you could see what a day in your future life would actually be like.

If you’re thinking about starting your own business, you could volunteer for an entrepreneur you know. If you’re thinking about becoming a solicitor, you could go volunteer at a local solicitor’s office. If you want to become an architect, you could shadow an architect for a few days - offer to bring them coffee, do their admin work, etc.

This is my goal in the next few months.

Basically, I’m going to try and find volunteer work in all of the different roles I think I might like to do, so that when the time comes, I have some actual experience to base my decision on.

However, there are some industries you can’t just go volunteer in.

Thankfully, you can’t just ‘try out’ being a surgeon, judge or a dentist for one day.So what can you do then?

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Career Conversations

​''What's money? A man is a success if he gets up in the morning and goes to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do.'' Bob Dylan

Between 2011 and 2012, the polling company Gallup conducted a survey to find out how people really felt about their work.

They surveyed millions of workers in 142 different countries, and found that:

13% of people are ‘engaged’ - meaning they are enthusiastic about what they do for a living and feel they are making a positive contribution through their work

63% of people are ‘not engaged’ - i.e. ‘sleepwalking through their workday, and putting time but not energy or passion into their work’

24% of people are ‘actively disengaged’ - not only are they unhappy at work, they are actively undermining what their engaged coworkers accomplish, and basically out to damage their company.

In other words, 87% of people don’t like what they do for work every day.

Why would this be?

In his book; 'Stumbling Upon Happiness', psychologist Daniel Gilbert makes it clear that as human beings, we’re terrible predictors of what will make us happy in the future.

When considering a career path, we dream up a picture of our future selves in the situation and imagine how it’ll make us feel.

The problem with this approach is that often our imagination is faulty, and we have no clue about what a typical day in the job actually involves.

If, like me, you’re terrified of ending up in the ‘87%’, Gilbert advocates a different approach.

Simply put, if you think you’d like to do something, the best way to figure out what it’s actually like, is to speak to someone who is currently already doing it.

Radical advice, I know - but it’s not common sense.

Since reading Gilbert’s book, I’ve been arranging phone conversations with people who work in all the different careers I think I might be interested in, and asking them questions like:

‘What does a typical working day look like for you?’

‘What about the job do you find most rewarding?’

‘What are the worst parts of it?’

‘If you were going back to before you started, is there anything you know now, that you wish you knew then?’

‘If you were starting from scratch, how would you approach your education?’

This might be slightly uncomfortable to do - but if you think about what it could save you in time, effort and money, it’s potentially one of the most worthwhile investments you could make.

It’s enabled me to construct a better picture of what a typical working day looks like in each of the careers I’m interested in, and helped me get a bit clearer on the route I want to go down.

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“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman

As Gallup’s study demonstrated, the vast majority of us (around 87%) will end up doing work every day we don’t enjoy.

If we’re lucky, we’ve each only got about eighty laps of the sun, and chances are, we’ll spend a sizeable chunk of those laps working.

Therefore, one of the most important things you could ever do, is to figure out a working situation that you find interesting and enjoyable - one that you wake up in the morning and look forward to.

‘Minimum viable work experience’, and ‘career conversations’ are two simple (and low cost) ways to do that.

In the last post: ‘Learning How to Learn’, I wrote about strategies for learning new skills faster and more efficiently.

However, it’s no good being able to learn something fast, if you’re not able to remember it, too.

So, in this post, we’ll look at how memory works, how the brain stores information, and why it’s critical to master the fundamentals starting off.

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How Memory Works

There are two major types of memory systems.

Working memory, and long term memory.

Working memory is critical in the early stages of learning a new skill. It involves all the things you can hold in your conscious attention at any one time.

It used to be thought we could hold about 7 items, but now most scientists agree that the number is closer to four.

It can help to think of working memory like juggling tennis balls.

The only way you can keep the tennis balls in the air (and items in our working memory) is to keep adding a little energy.

If you don’t maintain the items in working memory actively, you'll forget the information, and drop the tennis balls.

Long term memory, on the other hand, is more like a large storage warehouse with room for millions of items.

Once you get information in there, it’s there to stay, and can be accessed in the future.

Therefore, when learning something new, what you’re really aiming to do, is transfer the material from working memory into long term memory.

​If you can do that, it frees up the limited storage space in your working memory to focus on the new parts of the skill you’re trying to master.

So how do you take something from working memory, and store it in long term memory?

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Chunking

Chunks are pieces of information that are bound together through meaning.

Chunking makes it easy to learn and remember new things.

​Instead of having to remember everything and recall it when we go to do something, we access a 'chunk' of stored memory that contains the key information we’re looking for.

It’s similar to taking a huge computer file, and converting it into a compressed .zip file.

An example of a chunk is getting dressed.

When you got dressed this morning, you didn’t have to think: move left arm to pick up jeans. Put right leg into right side of jeans and slide foot downward until foot appears at the other end. Now insert left leg into the left side of jeans and slide foot downward.

And so on..

You simply accessed the ‘getting dressed’ chunk in your long term memory, and used it to perform the routine automatically.

It’s like all of the basic steps of getting dressed are stored in a ‘process’ .zip file in your brain, and whenever you need to use it, your brain opens up the file and follows the steps in the process - without you having to think about it.

So why is chunking relevant to learning new skills?

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Focusing on Fundamentals

Fundamentals are the core elements of the skill that everything else is built upon.

​A fundamental of driving is being able to change gears. (There’s no point in learning how to park, turn, reverse, etc, until you can do this first.) A fundamental of playing ice hockey is being able to ice skate. A fundamental of playing polo is being able to ride a horse, etc.

When learning a new skill, it’s critical to store the the fundamentals as ‘chunks’ in long term memory, so you can free up space in working memory to focus on learning new material as you progress.

If you don’t ‘chunk’ the fundamentals and make them automatic, your brain continuously has to devote part of its limited working memory capacity to these items.

Therefore, you have less working memory available to concentrate on learning new skills as you progress.

Take the example of two people learning to drive - Dave and Claire.

The first lesson involves learning how to change gears. Dave spends 10 minutes on it during the lesson, and moves onto the next thing. Claire also spends 10 minutes on it during the lesson, but then practices when she goes home that night, and for 30 minutes each night the following week.

She focuses on repeating it over, and over again, until it becomes automatic.

By the end of the week, Claire has created a gear-changing ‘chunk’ in her long term memory.

Both individuals have their second lesson seven days later - which focuses on parallel parking.

As mentioned previously, learning new skills involves using working memory, and like a juggler juggling tennis balls, we can only keep about four items in there at any one time.

When Dave - who hasn’t transferred the ‘changing gears’ chunk to long term memory, is learning how to parallel-park the car, half of his working memory is focusing on parking, and the other half is still focusing on changing gears.

Claire, on the other hand, doesn’t have to devote any of her working memory to changing gears because it’s ‘chunked’ in her long term memory and automatic for her.

​Therefore, she can concentrate 100% of her working memory on learning how to parallel-park the car.

If the two were to do a parallel-parking test after the second lesson, who do you think would get the better score?

So, we see then, that if you’re able to ‘chunk’ the fundamentals in your long term memory, it allows you to focus 100% of your working memory on the new areas of the skill you’re trying to master.

Therefore, you can learn more efficiently, and greatly increase your learning speed.

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Learning how to learn is arguably life’s most important skill.

​If you can do this, you can learn any new skill faster and more efficiently.

However, there’s no point in learning anything, unless you have the ability to remember it, too.

Understanding the difference between short term and long term memory, chunking, and focusing on the fundamentals, are three core principles you can use to increase your learning speed, and make your learning permanent.

So instead of setting the goal of; ‘learn Spanish’, you would aim for being able to hold a 2 minute conversation with a local. Instead of ‘learning the guitar’, your goal would be to play a specific song.

The clearer you can be on your target performance level, then the more effective you can be at creating a learning strategy for getting there.

As the saying goes - it's very difficult to hit a target you're not aiming at.

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#2 - ​Deconstruction

Every skill is made up of a set of sub-skills; parts that make up the whole.

The key then, when learning anything new, is to identify what specific sub-skills make up the whole - the fundamental building blocks.

Done properly, this allows you to isolate each sub-skill in turn and focus on mastering them one at a time.

Once you’ve done that, you can begin putting them all together to form the whole.​

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#3 - Selection - Finding Your 20%

Pareto’s principle states that in any situation, 20% of the inputs create 80% of the outputs.

Or said differently, 20% of causes result in 80% of the effects.

For example, 20% of a company’s products generate 80% of its profits. In any team, 20% of the members will do 80% of the work. You probably wear 20% of your clothes, 80% of the time. The richest 20% of people hold more than 80% of the world’s wealth. 80% of Youtube views belong to 20% of the creators.

And so on..

This is a universal principle, and luckily for our purposes, it also applies to learning new skills.

In other words, 20% of your learning ‘inputs’ will generate 80% of the ‘outputs’ you’re after.

The key then, is to identify what this 20% is before you begin, so you can focus your efforts on the areas that matter most.

So how do you do that?

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#4 - ​Look for Outliers

Looking for outliers involves identifying individuals who can help you find ‘high frequency learning material’ - the 20%.

If you can do this, it will allow you to get the maximum return on investment on each moment spent learning, and save weeks, maybe months of trial, error, and frustration.

So how do you find individuals like this?

In the 4 Hour Chef, Tim Ferriss recommends searching for people who are good at a skill who shouldn’t be. In other words, people who have mastered something against the odds - in spite of limitations and unfortunate genetics.

In short, you’re looking for the opposite of a ‘natural’.

​For example, If you want to learn public speaking, you would look for an introvert who is now a confident speaker. For guitar, you might seek out the world’s best one-armed guitar player. To learn accounts, you would find an artist who has published a book on the subject.

To overcome their limitations, outliers will usually have had to use an unconventional approach.

And very often, their approach contains clues you can use to accelerate your own learning process.

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If you go through the modern education system, you’ll spend about eighteen years of your life learning.

You’ll study everything from history, physics, music and art.

Yet, not once during this eighteen year period, will you be taught how to learn - which is arguably the most important thing you could learn.

Because if you can do that, it can make learning everything else a lot easier and quicker.​The principles outlined in this post - beginning with the end in mind, deconstruction, selection and looking for outliers, are four simple things you can do to learn any new skill faster and more effectively.​

There’s no denying that it can be an empowering way to look at the world.

But is this ancient piece of wisdom true, given what recent research in neuroscience has since revealed about the human mind?

In this post, I’ll explore the work of Anil Seth - one of the world’s leading researchers into the neuroscience of consciousness. ​According to Professor Seth, the reality we experience every day is a kind of ‘controlled hallucination’ by the brain.

Sounds ridiculous right?

You might think differently by the time you’re finished reading this post.

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Imagine being a brain.

You’re locked inside a skull where no light or sound can get in – all you’ve got to go on are the electrical impulses in your environment.

Somehow, the brain transforms these electrical impulses into the sights we see, the sounds we hear and even what we feel.

‘Perception – figuring out what’s out there – is a process of informed guesswork in which the brain combines sensory signals from the environment with its prior expectations or beliefs about the way the world is, to form its best guess about what caused those signals.

‘The brain doesn’t hear sound or see light. What we perceive is its best guess of what’s out there in the world.’

In other words, you don’t see what’s ‘out there’.

What you see, is a combination of sensory signals from the environment andyour brain’s best predictions about what caused those signals.

Our common sense tells us that perception is caused by signals coming into the brain from the outside world, like the image below:​

However, the latest research in neuroscience is showing that what we perceive depends as much, if not more, on the brain’s predictions flowing in the opposite direction:

‘We don’t just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. The world as we experience it, comes as much, if not more, from the inside-out, as from the outside-in.’ Anil Seth

Perception then is a creative process, in which our brain’s predictions, beliefs and prior expectations play a key role in generating our conscious experience of reality.

In a way then, we don’t see the world as it is, we see it as we are.

​Next, we'll look at a simple experiment you can do, to test this out for yourself.

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Test Your Hearing

Before reading any further, please press play on the below clip:

Could you make any sense of it? I’m guessing probably not. (Try again if you’re not sure.)

​Next, listen to this clip:

Now, listen to the first clip again:

The first time you listened, you probably heard incoherent gibberish.

The second time, you might have heard a political statement.

So what’s going on?

The clip was exactly the same, all that changed was your prior expectations.

This experiment demonstrates that even what we hear, depends on what our brain is expecting to hear – not the actual sounds in the environment.

So much so, that it can transform incoherent gibberish into a political statement.

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Cleaning the Glasses​

Science is now proving what the ancients have taught for thousands of years:

Our experience of the world, is, in a large part, determined by the mind that perceives it.

It’s like we’re all interpreting the world through our own unique set of glasses.

Some people are using a crystal clear, high definition pair, with bluetooth speakers playing their favourite music as they go about their day.

Others, are walking around with mud on theirs; so they go around seeing mud on everything.

The main insight I’ve taken from Professor Seth’s work, is that if you want to improve the quality of your life, a great place to start is by focusing on improving the quality of your mind.

Otherwise, you could be the wealthiest person in the world by external standards, but you'll still go around seeing mud on everything.

I don’t know if it was because I was working for myself, or if it was living in London (perhaps a combination of the two), but I felt cut off, isolated and really just not myself for a while.

But the last thing I wanted to do, was tell anybody about it.

Loneliness is associated with shame in our culture; we’re embarrassed to admit we feel it.

In a 2016 survey, research from the British Red Cross indicated that over 9 million people in the UK (nearly one fifth of the population) regularly feel lonely.

But almost two thirds feel uncomfortable admitting to it.

Later, while reading Johann Hari's Lost Connections, I discovered the work of John Cacioppo - one of the world’s leading researchers into the psychology and neuroscience of loneliness.

In this post, I’ll explore some of Cacioppo’s key findings; why loneliness evolved, and how it affects us in the modern world.

---Loneliness is a Signal

‘‘Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.’’ Theodosius Dobzhansky

It can help to think of loneliness like hunger and thirst.

Hunger is a signal from your body to seek nutrition, and thirst is a signal from your body to seek hydration.

If you didn’t have these signals (and never felt hungry or thirsty) then you wouldn’t have to eat or drink, and therefore wouldn’t survive.

In the same way, loneliness is a signal from your body to seek social connection.

Being starved or excessively dehydrated is dangerous for obvious reasons. No food = early death. No water = early death. So, it’s a no-brainer why hunger and thirst evolved.

But why would we evolve feelings of loneliness?

We know that genetic adaptations take approximately 25,000 years to develop in humans.

So, although we live in the modern world, our bodies, brains and genes don’t know this. They’re still ‘programmed’ for a hunter gatherer environment; where we lived off the land in small nomadic tribes, hunted animals and gathered our food.

In those days, with dangerous predators around every corner, safety really did come in numbers, and belonging to a group was critical for your survival.

Being isolated not only decreased your chances of finding your own food, it also made you easy lunch for another animal. Just like excessive hunger and thirst, excessive isolation was also likely to result in an early death.

Therefore, to help us survive, we evolved the negative feeling of loneliness as a danger signal to motivate us to return to the safety of the tribe. If you didn’t have the ‘loneliness’ signal, then you were much less likely to survive than those who did.

So the first thing to realise is that feeling lonely is a natural, biological response, and there’s no more shame in that, than there is in feeling hungry or thirsty.

So what happens in the body, when you are chronically lonely?

---​The Fight or Flight Response (Gone Wrong)

​“For a social species, to be on the edge of the social perimeter is to be in a dangerous position. The brain goes into a self-preservation state that brings with it a lot of unwanted effects.” John Cacioppo

We evolved in an environment where danger lurked around every corner.

There were bears in the bushes, snakes in the grass, and hyenas on the horizon.

To protect us from these threats, we evolved the ‘fight or flight’ system. This is a stress response that floods your body with hormones which make you hyper-vigilant and enable you to respond quickly and effectively in dangerous situations.

The ‘fight or flight’ mechanism evolved for short bursts of intense activity, e.g. fending off wild dogs or sprinting away from a bear, and was usually followed by a period of recovery and relief.

However, we now know the same system gets activated when we feel excessively isolated.

But instead of a short intense, stressful period followed by recovery, when you are chronically lonely, your body stays in a continuous state of high-stress, hyper-vigilance, that has extremely negative effects - both physically and mentally.

In fact, constantly having ‘fight or flight’ chemicals in your system is toxic for the body and accelerates the aging process. Studies have found that chronic loneliness increases your odds of an early death by 45%, and the risk of developing dementia in later life by 64 per cent.

It makes you more vulnerable to depression and heart disease, and makes it almost impossible to get a good night's sleep.

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As a society, social media has made us more ‘connected’ than we’ve ever been.

Yet, with one in five in the UK affected every year, we’re lonelier than we’ve ever been, too.

Worse still, we’re ashamed of our loneliness, so we keep it to ourselves, which makes the problem worse.

Therefore, it’s critical to understand that loneliness is simply a biological signal; as natural as hunger and thirst.

And just as we eat when we’re hungry, and drink when we feel thirsty, we need to connect with others in a meaningful way when we’re lonely.​Otherwise, your whole system goes into a toxic, hyper-vigilant, ‘fight or flight’ state, that slowly erodes you from the inside-out.